Interactive

AI Role Explainers

Pick any AI role and see what a real working day looks like — with salary context and honest assessments of what the job actually involves.

Pick a role

⚙️

ML Engineer

Builds and ships production machine learning systems

Salary (MY)

RM 10k – 22k / mo

Mid to senior. Junior roles start from RM 6k.

Key skills

PythonPyTorch / TensorFlowMLOpsSQLDockerSystem design

A typical day

9:00

Monitoring review

Admin / ops

Check model performance dashboards. Flag any drift in fraud detection recall — looks like a 0.8% drop over 48 hours, worth investigating.

9:30

Code review

Collaboration

Review two PRs from junior engineers. One has a subtle data leakage issue in the feature pipeline. Leave detailed comment explaining why it matters in production.

11:00

Experiment analysis

Deep work

New model architecture finished training overnight. 3% improvement on validation set but 40% slower at inference. Write up trade-off analysis for the team.

13:30

Cross-functional sync

Collaboration

Product wants new feature in three weeks. Honest answer is six. Negotiate scope — trimming three requirements gets it to four weeks without compromising quality.

15:00

Deep engineering work

Deep work

Redesigning feature store to support real-time lookups for the fraud model. This is the work that moves the architecture forward. Block calendar, mute Slack.

17:30

Documentation

Admin / ops

Write runbook for the new serving infrastructure. Unglamorous. Essential. Saves hours of debugging at 2 AM when something inevitably breaks.

The honest realities

→More engineering than science — most of the job is pipelines, monitoring, and debugging.

→The model is rarely the bottleneck. Data quality and infrastructure usually are.

→You will be on-call. Production systems break at inconvenient times.

How people get here

Software engineer or data scientist who moved into productionisation. CS or EE background most common but not required.

At a glance

All roles at a glance

⚙️

ML Engineer

RM 10k – 22k / mo

Builds and ships production machine learning systems

PythonPyTorch / TensorFlowMLOps+3 more

🔬

Data Scientist

RM 8k – 18k / mo

Turns messy data into models and insights that drive decisions

Python / RStatisticsMachine learning+3 more

🗺️

AI Product Manager

RM 9k – 18k / mo

Shapes AI products from user need to shipped feature

Product strategyAI fundamentalsUser research+3 more

✍️

Prompt Engineer

RM 6k – 14k / mo

Designs and optimises how AI systems understand and respond

LLM fundamentalsEvaluation designPython scripting+3 more

🔧

MLOps Engineer

RM 10k – 20k / mo

Keeps production AI systems running reliably at scale

Kubernetes / DockerCI/CD pipelinesCloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure)+3 more

🧪

AI Research Scientist

RM 12k – 28k / mo

Advances the technical frontier through experimentation and publication

Deep learning theoryMathematical foundationsResearch methodology+3 more

🛰️

Forward Deployed Engineer

RM 5k – 18k / mo

Embeds with clients to ship working AI solutions into production — fast

PythonFull-stack (React/Node)LLM / RAG integration+3 more

🤖

AI Agent Engineer

RM 4k – 24k / mo

Builds autonomous AI agents that reason, call tools, and get work done

LLM orchestration (LangChain/LangGraph)Function calling & tool useVector databases+3 more

🧠

LLM / GenAI Engineer

RM 5k – 20k / mo

Fine-tunes, deploys, and evaluates large language models in production

LLM fine-tuning (LoRA/QLoRA)RAG architecturePrompt engineering at scale+3 more

⚡

AI Automation Specialist

RM 3.5k – 15k / mo

Builds AI-powered workflows that automate business operations end-to-end

Workflow platforms (n8n/Make/Zapier)RPA tools (UiPath)API integration & webhooks+3 more

⚖️

AI Governance Specialist

RM 5k – 30k / mo

Ensures AI systems are ethical, compliant, and accountable

AI regulatory frameworks (EU AI Act, MY Code)Model risk & bias assessmentPDPA / data privacy+3 more